Monopolies to Break Up?

[TNF]

Why would we want to turn the clock back? The solution to monopoly is to put those industries that have managed to make it to the top of the capitalist food chain is not to break them up (and risk destroying jobs and undermining the rationalization and centralization of production), but to bring them into public ownership. Monopoly in and of itself is not bad, but monopolies controlled by private capitalists are because they have an interest in fleecing the public.

Under public ownership (combined, of course, with democratic control of these industries by the public, organized into workers' councils), Sirius XM might be made ubiquitous. Every car and home in America could have access to a variety of programming currently off limits to them, and the superior mode of transmitting those signals could allow us to phase out dilapidated radio infrastructure. Likewise, public ownership of Monsanto would give us the ability to radically alter the way we produce food. We are already well aware of the benefits that GM crops can bring, but under capitalist production, they're not going to be put to good use. We could grow better food for more people, and we could break the stranglehold of corn production on our diets and take steps toward curbing the obesity epidemic.

Public ownership of movie studios would mean an end to the dictation of what we see in the theaters by a small clique of owners, and allow for better films to be made because it would open up the industry to democratic input. Same goes for television, of course. The Internet under public ownership would bring us faster speeds (as is the case in Chattanooga, home of the country's fastest broadband network, which is of course, municipally owned) and would guarantee network neutrality. We could guarantee an Internet free from censorship or state monitoring of every little thing we do if we owned the Internet and exercised democratic control of it.

As for cell phone service providers, public ownership would mean the right of everyone to communicate without data caps and without intrusive contract agreements. I think that the best way to go forward is not to break up those industries which have an overbearing presence on the lot of us under capitalism, but to make those industries work for us, by allowing us to take ownership of them and manage them in a democratic fashion.

[TNF]

Why would we want to turn the clock back?

There's something hilariously ironic about a post starting with this sentence and then advocating antiquated economics like nationalization.

But I'm not advocating for the old line type of nationalization that allows the decisions of the nationalized industry to be made by government planners or hired capitalist managers, so the assertion that what I'm advocating is 'antiquated' is incorrect. I want public ownership of industry, yes, but unless its combined with democratic control by the workers of those industries, it's going to inevitably run into the same issues that bureaucratized state industry did during the last century.